“Monstrously delicate” is how Brecht described his poetry (as recalled by Eric Bentley in Theater magazine of Spring 1983, p. 8). The same might be said of Brecht’s plays—and of the task of staging them. In the United States particularly, directing Brecht is a process that never seems to go right; one reads or hears of rather frequent Brecht productions in the network of university and regional theaters, but seldom do they spur much enthusiasm, seldom is a real Brechtian satisfied. The cliché persists with few rebuttals: American artists don’t seem to know what to do with Brecht’s plays.

Given the elusiveness of the Echt, or “pure,” Brecht (in production or in production style), one is naturally tempted to idealize Brecht’s own stagings at the Berliner Ensemble. Those stagings, now legendary, have browbeaten a generation of theater artists and set a standard that is ineradicable, yet indecipherable: for we sense the superiority of the original stagings without being able to reproduce it. Dutiful imitation is the height of our achievement, and it is poor imitation at that: we manage to bypass the famous power, clarity, and humanity of the original, and reproduce only the grayness, the monotony, of the Berliner Ensemble Modellbücher (Model-Book) photos in dispiritingly familiar, derivative, and hollow revivals.

Clearly, we have fallen into a trap, albeit one set by Brecht himself. We idealize his stage direction uncritically, failing to discriminate between letter and spirit in the “law” of the Modellbücher. Further, because a theatrical style is the most fragile and impermanent of artistic codes, we court the clear and present danger of confining Brecht’s plays in what are now overfamiliar and dated theatrical practices—practices that have fossilized at the Berliner Ensemble itself since the playwright’s death a generation ago. On the other hand, one cannot ignore the international acclaim for Brecht’s own productions when they were first seen, nor avoid the impression that those plays became something greater under the playwright’s direction. This wayward genius’s eccentric, elusive way with actors and with mise-en-scène seems to have added new ranges of signification, a new fullness of import and meaning, to his texts. For this reason, there can be no complete understanding of the plays that does not consider these celebrated productions.

This section of my essay is intended as a beginning effort in a much-needed analysis of Brecht’s directing style—both as a dramaturgy of texts and a “theaterturgy” of stagings, aimed at discovering some of the principles which underlie the distracting plenitude of discussable details that Brecht crowded onto Berlin’s Schiffbauerdamm stage. It is an axiom of this study that Brecht’s direction tapped the power of his own scripts through a precise, organic connection between play and production. If this is true, analysis of the plays and of their stagings must interpenetrate: the play as written becomes a guide to understanding Brecht’s staging, and the staging reveals the play. One hopes that, when this project is finally and fully addressed (as can only be done tentatively and in the way of foundations here), it will facilitate new productions that can incorporate new theatrical environments, vocabularies, and conventions without betraying a Brecht play’s own structure, techniques, and dramatic identity.

Before turning to Brecht’s directing, let me say that his criticism itself must be read critically; only then can it help to deepen our understanding of his dramaturgical procedures. This is particularly true of his persistent inveighing against the tradition of naturalism, and of his sometimes hyperbolic claims for having utterly rejected its techniques. In fact, if one were to say outright that Brecht was a naturalistic director, the error would be only partial. For the textural aspects of naturalism appealed to Brecht’s taste a great deal. His careful attention to realistic stage “business,” the use of real objects bought in markets rather than stage property simulations, the love of the unadorned textures of real wood, metal, leather, and fabric—all these manifest a personal, visual, and tactile sensitivity that brought a number of naturalistic surfaces onto Brecht’s stage, and in so doing insured an appearance of realism, a particular kind of verisimilitude.

Of course, aside from its sensual value, verisimilitude was tonally and ideationally important to Brecht, since it manifested his yearning for a proletarian authenticity. That is why, although he was a great (and self-promoting) theatrical stylist, Brecht was nevertheless suspicious of the impulse toward style. (I am consciously using the word in the customary, if somewhat imprecise way that comes readily to hand in a mimetic age: “style” as anything—including photographic realism—that differs from undifferentiated reality.) He wanted to encourage an audience to peer beneath familiar surfaces so as to discover the political and moral truths that are often undetected in daily living—yet he wanted to leave those surfaces, those outward appearances and manifestations of reality, as undisturbed and undistorted as possible. This, of course, constitutes a fundamental ambiguity: a naturalistic impulse and an anti-naturalistic one mated.

This opposition of impulses yields a kind of Brechtian hermeneutics, in which the audience is impelled to recognize—and more, to penetrate and pass through—familiar appearances in order to seek out a truth that is implied but never explicitly stated. Audience members proceed imaginatively from their own time and space through a fictional realm of more or less realistically rendered events, until they come to a plane of partially-defined sources of insight, a plane beyond common appearances, beyond customary ways of seeing. This implicit progression changes the nature of the natural, making it both an oracle and a veil. Thus the term “naturalism” will not do here. Brecht opposed the “natural” ways of seeing that the word implies. He tried to appropriate the word “realism” from the socialist realists, but this term, too, has the wrong connotations. For this essay, I shall call Brecht’s peculiar verisimilitude “the lifelike,” insofar as the word can imply both a similarity to and a difference from the “life” of objective reality. To study Brecht’s dramaturgy and staging must necessarily be to study the lifelike—and the half-disguised, half-exposed techniques with which Brecht violated lifelikeness, shaping experience to his ideas without too severely disturbing its familiar appearance.

For all its incorporation of lifelike elements, however, Brecht’s practice clearly differed from any strictly mimetic drama, and Brecht liked to make much of that difference. Unfortunately, he tended to state the matter in somewhat confusing terms, centering on the loosely-deployed word Verfremdung. In the larger sense, Verfremdung is the key concept in Brecht’s aesthetic, the umbrella term that covers all his methods of alerting the audience to a special critical awareness of the dramatic action. In this full sense, the term covers a great many different features of Brecht’s work: the exotic settings, for example; the use of verse or song to heighten a point in the dramatic argument; an instance of dramaturgical juxtaposition in which a character’s most earnest statement is made ironic by an unexpected context.

This is Verfremdung, then, as a general or categorical term, covering a number of dramatic and theatrical devices—but only when those devices are used for the specific purpose of surprising the audience into a higher, and more critical, awareness. No device is inherently a Verfremdungs-Effekt. And it was on this point that Brecht himself created confusion, by applying the general term to a smaller and more specific instance of itself, thus blurring principle and example. That is, Brecht came to use the general term Verfremdung as a synonym for what a theater historian would more rightly call theatricalism—meaning nothing more than the use of frankly theatrical devices, such as masks, non-illusionary settings, visible scene changes, and the like. Brecht assumed that dressing the mise-en-scène with theatricalist elements—which in a loose sense could mean anything non-mimetic—would naturally lead the audience to the elusive wakefulness of Verfremdung.

This is, inferably, related to Brecht’s misreading of Viktor Shklovsky, whose ostrannenie was a direct ancestor of Brecht’s neologistic Verfremdung: where Shklovsky proposed an artistic practice that made one aware of the artist’s materials, Brecht added an assumption that this attention to the artistic medium would necessarily draw an audience into contemplating the larger outlines of the dramatic argument. Any good Prague semiologist could have shown Brecht that theatricalism doesn’t always work that way; many august Brechtians have made the same argument; and Brecht himself acknowledged the problem, as if on the sly, in the Short Organum (Brecht on Theatre, 1964, pp. 191–192). Yet Brecht continued to function as if on faith, on a willed belief that with the use of theatricalist decoration, he could solve the extremely subtle problem of controlling his audience’s sympathy with push-button ease. It became a kind of never-ending refrain in Brecht’s self-explanations: every sharply-defined stylistic touch became not itself but another Verfremdungs-Effekt, and the Verfremdung was supposed to suit and explain virtually everything Brecht did.

The result is an imprecise and reductive vision of Brecht’s writing and staging, although a vision that Brecht himself engineered. It suggests that every non-mimetic device in Brecht’s extremely heterogeneous staging style is equivalent to every other in intention and effect; worse, it fosters the belief that theatricalist mannerisms are what make Brecht—so that any production, of any kind of play, which uses a visible scene-change is suddenly understood to be “Brechtian.” Words like “Brechtian” and “defamiliarization” (or its less adequate synonym “alienation”) are drained of meaning in this way, and any precise perceiving of Brecht’s work and methods dissolves into a blurred understanding.

If we were to reverse this distorted vision, we would come closer to the truth. Brecht’s non-realistic passages and elements are not synonymous and uniform, but diverse, and they are directed toward discrete, separable effects. (Thus, an exposed lighting instrument is not the equivalent of a mask, and an ironic song is not a non-realistic setting.) Moreover, theatricalism in itself is not some Quintessence of Brechtianism. On the contrary, some of Brecht’s theatricalist habits are inessential and decorative, while others are indispensable manifestations of central traits in his playwriting. Such distinctions have to be made before the relations among play, production, and theoretical criticism can yield a useful understanding.

The following notes will offer initial explanations of a number of the non-realistic elements in Brecht’s stagings, attempting a kind of anatomy or phenomenology of style. That these are what I shall call “first principles” is true in a double sense: in that this analysis is only a beginning that will leave a great deal still to be explored, and in that these principles operate on a primary level, one of deep structure, giving order and predicating dramaturgical patterns. It is important that the incompleteness of these notes be kept in mind, for there is a risk of falling into Brecht’s own trap of analyzing his work too narrowly, or of presumptively categorizing every element of the Brecht stage as if it were only another interchangeable element in an abstruse intellectual design. Brecht’s work is only partly susceptible to systematic analysis; there is an impulsive, improvisational quality to his writing and staging, and an eccentric beauty to both, that, while important, can only be peripherally addressed here, since my investigation is aimed at what I’ve called the “hermeneutics”—the significations—of the Brecht stage.

Principles of directed attention, or the heightening of detail

Stage naturalism—in theory—presumes an accidental quality, a sense of dispersed focus and a prizing of each available locus for the viewer’s attention. There is in it at least a pretense of a minimal distortion of experience, a renouncing of manipulation and artifice. (That theatrical naturalism promised this, yet tended to include frankly melodramatic contrivances, was part of what spurred Brecht’s disgust for the style—and his preference for relaxed tonalities and disjointed structures.) Brecht’s distinctive staging style begins with a rejection of dispersed focus: he specialized in subtly directing his audience’s attention so as to arouse a special, penetrating awareness that might withstand distraction.

Characteristically, Brecht loved to direct his audience’s attention to the suggestive detail, the small, barely noticeable gesture that bears a huge meaning. This is the vision that sees importance in a general’s handling of a bar of soap, draws proud attention to Helene Weigel’s way of biting a coin, finds an important hidden meaning in Weigel’s accentuation of a single word in Courage’s lullaby to the dead Kattrin, and insists that a fugitive aristocrat in The Caucasian Chalk Circle would be unable to copy a poor man’s way of eating.

Accordingly, staging methods for Brecht’s plays need to include a way of drawing the audience’s attention to selected, significant details. This is a principle that shapes not only the performance, but the writing of the plays as well. For instance, characterization tends to be built through selective emphasis. With most of his secondary characters, there are only a few traits that are important to Brecht, and, accordingly, he highlights them. Consider the photographs of the masks for Mr. Puntila and His Man Matti in Theaterarbeit, where one can see the “typicality” of characters—the absurdity and obtuseness of the judge, the strangely cold and almost brutal quality Brecht sought to bring out in Puntila. We learn about these characters only what we need to know so that they can fill their place in the drama, but we learn it in a striking, theatrical way.

Significantly, these masks are only very subtly distortive. It would be possible to glance at these figures and see them not as masked “types,” but only as unusually vivid characterizations in costume, bearing, and make-up. Always reluctant to stretch the lifelike too far, Brecht saw to it that such physical distortion remained subtle, a matter of stressed detail that moves us immediately into the realm of his idiosyncratic, mannerist realism. With somewhat less subtlety, but by means of a similar process, characters are simplified into an exaggerated essence by the cruder and more obviously theatrical masks of The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Even without masks, one can see traces of the same thing in the clearly defined postures of the actors in each of their many characterizations as they are shown in Theaterarbeit; and perhaps this was the essence of the doctrine of “gestic” acting—a distinctive, if slight, exaggeration of bodily gesture that makes the essential (and for Brecht that means social) traits of the character unusually readable and clear.

The same kind of selectivity and reliance on detail can be found in Brecht’s language. One example might be a phrase in the rubric to the first scene of Mother Courage and Her Children, which is usually translated “Mother Courage loses a son,” but more precisely would be “Mother Courage comes to lose a son”—a subtle difference that makes a point, since Brecht’s effort with this linguistic detail seems to be to draw our attention, not to the fact that Courage loses Eilif, but to the way (that is, the reason) that she comes to lose him, which is the essence of the play in miniature.

In short, Brecht’s “realism” is colored and subtly reshaped into something cryptic, suggestive, delicately distorted—a quietly formalized version of reality not unlike the Ernst Barlach sculptures that Brecht admired. Brecht wanted to essentialize experience by carefully directing his viewer’s eye, without, perhaps, seeming to do so.

Selective abstraction

The second principle of focusing the audience’s attention is nearly inseparable from the first: that the carefully selected details to which Brecht draws attention are displayed against a ground of great spareness. Conciseness and concentration are the signal virtues of Brecht’s poetry; and this is the same quality in theatrical terms: precisely realized details on a nearly blank stage. This principle has proved a major stumbling block for many American designers and directors of Brecht’s plays. For those who choose to find some route other than simple imitation of the Neher or Otto designs, the invitation to use theatricalist techniques often provokes a blinding flurry of mad “creativity,” endless elaborations of simple ideas, sheer luxuriation in unnecessary invention. What these enthusiasts fail to realize is that Brecht’s technique is one of precisely calculated abstraction in which all unnecessary matters are expunged.

This is most clearly exercised in the design of the settings that Brecht supervised and later glossed in his notes. He adored the spareness of Neher’s designs for Mother Courage and Her Children, for example: their functional quality of providing the actors with exactly the objects needed to carry out their theatrical tasks, but beyond that only the sketchiest indications of place and physical conditions. Rough screens and a flat stage floor were for Brecht instances of a beautiful aesthetic economy; he exulted in the refusal to fill in the empty spaces, preferring the fragmentary, suggestive, brisk look of a quick sketch.

The same spareness is present in Brecht’s distinctive control of stage movement. The movements of actors under Brecht’s direction have been described as bold, purposeful, never random, never indecisive or hesitant, but ever organized, clear, and uncluttered. Clearly, Brecht’s habit of working from Neher’s sketches to create the “grouping” of actors created a continuity of technique from scenic design to mise-en-scène; but more important, Brecht and Neher shared an exclusive and spare compositional style that linked not only groupings to scenic design, but all the visual elements to the writing itself.

The same principle thus enters Brecht’s writing in a number of ways. It is there in the conflation of time in The Caucasian Chalk Circle, when, with a narrator’s help, a few minutes’ pantomime enacts Grusche’s night-long vigil over the child in the first act; or when, without any intrusive devices, a single unbroken conversation stretches from midwinter through the spring thaw in the shed at Lavrenti’s farm. Perhaps most important, this radical selectivity affected Brecht’s way of writing characters, for he did not write psychologized personalities, but instead cautionary figures whose psyches were dictated and shaped by their given social roles. Brecht politicized the self and expunged purely psychological motivations: there is no libidinous subtext, there are no hidden obsessions. Even when, in The Tutor, Gustchen copulates with Lauffer as a substitute for her absent fiancé, the substitution is more or less conscious and excites no horror in the girl. Her motivations are not a Freudian tangle of unbidden urges; for Brecht, desire is concrete and unmysterious.

The real mystery that shapes Brecht’s dramaturgy is not that of unconscious desires, but of irreconcilable roles, contradictory social pulls acting on a single character. Inner conflict comes from without. In accordance with Brecht’s methods of abstraction, these conflicting needs are generalized, assumed, freed from biographical particularization: there is no point at which Mother Courage came to love her bastard brood, because her loyalty to them is a given; similarly, Shen Te’s affection for her flier arrives at an appropriate point in the dramatic action and is not particularized—Brecht is not Marivaux. He was interested in the results of a generous impulse, and typically drew attention away from that impulse’s wellsprings or its character-bound idiosyncrasies. Brecht’s characters are all to some degree ideational emblems; they are all stylized.

Just as designers are tempted to fill in the Brechtian blanks—those areas of the stage that he deliberately left in rough outline—actors will be tempted to fill in the characters’ broadly outlined motivations with psychological additives that shift us onto the wrong sort of dramatic ground. Brecht put certain characters in masks for a reason—their roles were masks, simplified, essentialized, sharply defined theatrical beings that must be played by imaginative actors who can match the thrust and precision of the minor characters’ incarnations (as well as those of the more specifically realized central characters), while still keeping the performance “clean,” or free of extraneous additions that only muddle the characterizations Brecht devised.

This means that actors and directors in his plays must be critical of their own impulses, able to select from their random impressions those elements that accord with what Brecht has given. He wanted richly detailed acting in his plays: he could wax rhapsodic over the minutiae of a good actor’s performance, but those elements that he praised were all relevant to the Brechtian world—the bitten coin, the increasingly servile bow of a frustrated student out of work, the lust of a prostitute’s protector—are all what Brecht called “social gests,” small, realistic actions that reveal the underlying social and economic relations of the characters involved. The psychological and the quaint are irrelevant here and are best excluded; beneath all its theatrical richness and subtlety, then, Brecht’s is a rigorous aesthetic.

The principle of visual contrast

Brecht’s dramaturgy is founded on carefully designed contradictions. He stated that explicitly in any number of his working notes. Here follow some of the ways that this ground of calculated contradictions found expression on Brecht’s stage.

The clearest example of “contrast over time” is Brecht’s immediate juxtaposition, between Scenes 6 and 7, of Mother Courage’s “God damn the war!” with her fierce defense of that war (“Stop running down the war. I won’t have it” [Brecht: Collected Plays, Vol. 5 (1980), trans. R. Manheim et alia])—an opposition that clarifies this “merchant-mother’s” contradictory roles and displays her moral discontinuity. By the starkness of the contrast, eliminating all gradation between her opposed positions, Brecht clarifies a striking incongruity that impels his audience toward a critical view of the character.

More common to Brecht’s dramaturgy—and less obvious—were the more gradual reversals that shape his construction of scenes. Brecht described this principle—a fundamental structural principle for him—in his treatise The Messingkauf Dialogues (1939–1942):

Suppose you’ve a play where the first scene shows A bringing B to justice, then the process is reversed in the last scene and, after all kinds of incidents have been shown, B brings A to justice, so that there’s one and the same process (bringing to justice) with A and B exchanging their respective roles (executioner and victim). In such a case you’ll undoubtedly arrange the first scene so as to give the maximum possible effectiveness to the last. You’ll ensure that on seeing the last scene the audience will immediately be reminded of the first; that the similarity will be striking; and at the same time that the differences will not be overlooked. (pp. 78–79 in The Messingkauf Dialogues, trans. John Willett [1965])

It was this principle of writing that determined a naturally corresponding principle of staging: reversal of the mise-en-scène in the course of a scene, so that the final stage image altered and commented on the first. Thus the famous scene in Life of Galileo of the Pope, whose attitudes toward Galileo change with his social role—with the donning, that is, of his clerical robes. Like Saint Joan’s change of costume after her confession in The Trial of Joan of Arc at Rouen, the Pope’s scene gives theatrical expression to a change of political roles and its accompanying attitudinal reversal. One man exits, and—both externally and internally—another enters, a transformation of the first.

These examples function within a single scene. Others function over a span of scenes as a progression in the plot and in the mise-en-scène. For example, the changes in Courage’s financial status are linked to her choices of action; thus, the changing appearance of her wagon and wares and the decreasing number of her family and followers are calculated, theatrically expressed criticisms of her decisions. Shen Te’s self-division into generous and selfish halves becomes a sequence of costume changes—a division that is echoed in a similar, but more gradually and realistically rendered, change in her lover, who begins as a careless but visionary pilot, only to become a vicious capitalist lackey.

The same principle can extend across whole plays from beginning to end. In this way, the final image of Mother Courage dragging her own wagon is made more outrageous and telling by our memory of her first entrance with three children and with her own greater youth and strength. Similar are the closing scenes in Life of Galileo, when Galileo’s lifelong student leaves him to his food. Or the gods’ unheeding exit at the end of The Good Person of Setzuan, amid cries for help—the exact obverse of their richly anticipated arrival in the first scene. The Mother’s concluding posture, with the titular character marching, flag in hand and part of a revolutionary band, itself is strengthened by our memory of her initial appearance alone, homebound, and helpless. In each case the stage picture clarifies the single “ground-reversal” upon which Brecht structured every one of his mature plays.

Brecht loved stage settings simultaneously divided into two adjoining sections, or a “contrast across space”: he wrote them into The Mother, Mother Courage and Her Children, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and Life of Galileo, either for the sake of allowing one half of the stage to comment on the other (as when Courage sings “The Wise Woman and the Soldier” to disrupt Eilif’s dance in the next tent), or else simply because he so enjoyed juxtaposition that he would put dissimilar things next to each other onstage simply for the sake of gratifying his own taste, no more—as in the wedding scene in The Caucasian Chalk Circle. But at his best, Brecht could combine this taste for laterally registered contrasts with an eye to clarifying the ideational contradictions in a scene.

Often he would make his points simply by movement and positioning, that is, by “blocking” patterns within the mise-en-scène: for example, in the scene outside the devastated village, Mother Courage’s acquiring a coat is visually contrasted to Kattrin’s rescue of a baby; at the end of the scene, each raises her own booty into the air, and the audience is tacitly encouraged to compare the two kinds of acquisition. Later, during the “drum scene,” Kattrin climbs a roof and risks her life to sound a warning of an impending attack to nearby villagers; on the opposite side of the stage, an old peasant woman, helplessly and unhelpfully, kneels and prays for the village’s deliverance.

Brecht had a way of using this lateral opposition to suggest moral opposites and temptations: there is scarcely a scene in Life of Galileo in which the representatives of Church and science do not position themselves on opposite sides of Galileo in order to sway him each to his or her own side. This is particularly true of the last scene between Andrea, Virginia, and Galileo, but works throughout the drama in an unusually direct way, almost as if Brecht were recalling the good and bad angels arguing with Faustus. Similarly, the playwright specified in his notes the meaning of a tableau in The Tutor: “It is here, at the university, that the young store up experiences, both on the intellectual and the physical plane. We see our man Fritz von Berg poised between sacred and profane lovers, between Patus and Bollwerk” [in Collected Plays, Vol. 9 (1973)]. When Courage loses Eilif, she is divided in space between a soldier, who tries to distract her, and Kattrin, who tries to alert her to the danger. Courage’s choice, and her priorities, are thereby made into something physical, kinetic—both realistically credible and symbolic at a high level of abstraction.

This intellectual progression from the imagined reality of fictional characters to the issues that their existence implies—what I have called Brechtian hermeneutics—is a journey through three realms of thought. Tacitly Brecht’s audience is addressed on three different levels: in terms of its own historical time and place, in terms of a fictional world (a different, conventionally given time and place), and in terms of an awareness of the issues that unite the fictional and contemporary worlds. In a theatrical realization, these three steps of an intellectual process become spaces on the stage, each keyed to a different mode in Brecht’s writing. Brecht’s theatrical practice and his dramaturgical techniques can thus be said to coalesce into a general pattern: the composite Brecht stage, an ideal division of theatrical space that theoretically houses the fullness of Brecht’s theatrical discourse by separating it into its constituent elements.

Of Brecht’s three realms of dramatic-cum-theatrical expression, we can begin with the one that Brecht’s drama shares with any other dramatic form: the fictional realm of depicted action, what Susanne Langer calls “virtual space”—the principal stage space behind the proscenium arch, where actors represent characters, and the stage represents a place and time outside itself. What distinguishes Brecht’s treatment of the enacted events in this fictionalized space is his desire to endow them with a special, implicative significance. As noted above, Brecht organizes the fictional events through carefully planned juxtapositions in the mise-en-scène, and through stylistic heightening of selected details and the de-emphasizing of extraneous matters: he attempts in these more or less subtle ways to clarify patterns and significances within the dramatic action. He also has recourse to other ways of attacking the audience’s customary, possibly uncritical, ways of seeing.

Two other realms of thought are recruited by Brecht and physically attached to the action, so that the surrounding stage becomes a commentator on the conventional dramatic sphere. The first of these extensional realms is one that expressly mediates between the fictional world of the drama and the time and space occupied by the audience: it is a sphere of explanation and exhortation, a perlocutionary element in Brecht’s writing. In the texts, it is the realm of the prologues that are always addressed expressly to the audience and suggest an understanding of the play in terms of the audience’s own current concerns. In the theater, this is a space located just downstage of the famous half-curtain—a space literally between the fictional action and the audience, figuratively joining the same time and space as the audience itself.

It is the place for the prologue to Antigone, which relates Sophocles’ story precisely to postwar Berlin’s situation; it is the realm of the scene-titles for The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, citing the precise events in German history that the “parable” was to illustrate by analogy. The prologue to The Caucasian Chalk Circle is similar in principle, explicitly connecting the ancient myth that is about to be enacted to the problems of postwar reconstruction under socialist principles; and Mr. Puntila and His Man Matti and The Tutor both have verse prologues that delineate the present usefulness of their stories. The function of this realm is almost anti-imaginative, anti-fictional; if the relation between the fictional realm and the audience’s circumstances is one of analogy (as it always is with Brecht), then the intervening realm of the prologue demystifies that analogy by explaining it.

Even when this element of Brecht’s thought is not used in so blunt a way, the same impulse can be felt in his writing. This is the impulse to address contemporary concerns through scarcely concealed references in the fictional action and dialogue: for example, Galileo’s attention-getting observations on the need to hide the truth while traveling through Germany, or the rather sentimental remarks he makes about the skeptical intelligence of the proletariat, are clearly directed to a particular audience’s self-awareness. When Brecht’s dialogue strains for this kind of undisguised relevance (in the middle of a fictionalized, “defamiliarized” action), it is language straining to break out into this downstage sphere of discourse, this direct mode of address.

The third realm of expression in Brecht’s plays is the physical and tactical opposite of the prologues and similar references to the audience’s immediate circumstances. This is the quintessentially Brechtian realm of obscured realities, of the invisible causes of the dramatic situation. If Brecht’s direct address to the audience is comparatively crude, this third sphere is refined enough to be difficult to express in any concrete theatrical way. It is a sphere of implications, of what lies “behind” the enacted events—and its stage space is that of the backdrop or even the backstage upstage of the drop, literally “behind” the fictional action.

For this reason, it is fitting that the final chorus of soldiers that comes closest to stating the playwright’s “message” in Mother Courage and Her Children is heard singing behind the scene. The enormous political forces that govern the action of The Mother are embodied in the huge, hovering political portraits projected on the backdrop and peering down at the fictional action. And the reality of Mr. Puntila and His Man Matti is shaped by a hermetically sealed bourgeois family situation that cannot tolerate the presence of the proletariat—so Brecht has a portrait of the family and friends, smiling and undisturbed, placed upstage to clarify the tensions that take over when the chauffeur Matti enters; the assumption of bourgeois hegemony is embodied on the backdrop, the better to be put into question by the contrasting tableau beneath it. The stage directions of Life of Galileo themselves suggest a frankly symbolic use of light—including a pair of astronomical projections on the backdrop that openly symbolize the allure and challenge of the truth and give a motif-bound unity to a long, complex dramatic action.

Even when it is not manifested as a literal backdrop, the same impulse to imply or to express in symbols the larger social issues “behind” the dramatic action can be detected. In one scene from Life of Galileo, when the conflict between the state and the new science is most clearly introduced, the formal cordialities of Galileo and the elder statesman are juxtaposed against the image of Galileo’s pupil and the young duke grappling and, in the process, breaking a Ptolemaic model of the universe: the symbolism could hardly be more obvious, but is effectively displayed, like the backdrop projections, as a simultaneous illustration of the underlying tension in the accompanying, lifelike scene.

This assemblage of impulses, which I am calling “The Composite Brecht Stage,” is another example of Brecht’s way of balancing an unblinkingly specific realism with calculated abstraction: the drama moves from direct audience-address in the most specific terms through a more or less realistically rendered story set in a more remote reality, and from there into a shadowy, symbolically rendered, incomplete and implicative sphere of inquiry—inquiry into implied causes, into the very assumptions of social life that must be addressed and changed. As one imaginatively moves away from the audience into the back reaches of the stage, one traverses fissures in Brecht’s language and rhetoric, moving from the almost importunately concrete to the teasingly unexpressed. Working in tandem, Brecht’s three modes of address form a complex, suggestive totality. They also create an unusually rich, original use of the stage’s opportunities for, and means of, expression.

The poetic principle

I want to mention briefly here a matter that is extremely important in an appreciation of Brecht, but one that has been given only scattered attention. This is Brecht’s theatrical poetry, his poetry of the theater, in Francis Fergusson’s phrase, a poetry of theatrical elements and effects rather than words. Beyond the symbolic use of mise-en-scène, there are symbolic tropes and patterns of reference, some of which echo from one play to the next and reinforce each other’s meaning. There are, for example, the recurring images of the cross and crucifixion in Mother Courage and Her Children; the image returns in the flier’s scene in The Good Person of Setzuan and in the Christ imagery that surrounds the beaten and bloody Azdak in the final scene of The Caucasian Chalk Circle, giving Brecht access to received images of martyrdom, which he can then deploy in unexpected and partly ironic ways. In fact, Christian images abound in Brecht, not least in the holy-family echoes in the latter play and in its baptismal scene of Grusche’s washing and dressing the child; Brecht’s fascination with maternal instinct is thereby colored with a displaced religious reverence.

Not all these motifs can be said to have a precise denotation; some operate affectively and by intuition. There is, for example, the ominous motif of white faces, the origin of which (a suggestion by Karl Valentin) has been frequently repeated; it appears in Begbick’s cosmetics in Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, in the faces of the soldiers in the prologue scenes of The Good Soldier Schweik, in Coriolanus, and elsewhere, as well as in Brecht’s early poetry, where it is always associated with decay and death. Moreover, some of the symbols, or motifs, seem to change meaning from one play to another: milk and cheese are reminders of Galileo’s unidealistic materiality, an aspect of his moral decline, yet the same products signify nurturing and protection in The Caucasian Chalk Circle—a play that dwells much on recurring images of milk, blood, and water: a maternalized poetic vocabulary for a play about maternality. Life of Galileo, too, claims its own symbolic tropes, appropriate to its subject: the sun and all other sources of light are used throughout as precise symbols of truth. Galileo’s daughter—who at one point carries a shaded candle—faints at the sight of the sun when it is optically magnified and projected on a wall; and Galileo himself symbolically loses his capacity to see the light after his recantation.

One symbol that is put to exquisite use through intertextuality is that of snow. In The Tutor, it serves as an explicit sign of the desire to let problems be covered up, concealed, and left uncorrected—an image of vicious complacency. Always, snow has a threatening quality. It is a symbolic (as well as a physical) opponent to the hero in The Good Soldier Schweik, as is the wintry chill of Mother Courage and Her Children. Only once does snow become an affirmative presence—at the moment in The Caucasian Chalk Circle when Grusche, having rescued the child and fully realized its importance to her, describes the world with the eyes of one who has become newly maternal, and entirely generous:

GRUSCHE. (looking around at Michael.) Never be afraid of the wind,

it’s only a poor devil like us. His job is pushing the clouds and he gets

colder than anybody.

(Snow begins to fall.)

The snow isn’t so bad either, Michael. Its job is covering the little fir trees

so the winter won’t kill them. And now I’ll sing a song for you. Listen! (Sings.)

Your father is a bandit

And your mother is a whore

Every nobleman and honest

Will bow as you pass

The tiger’s son will

Feed the little foals his brothers

The child of the serpent

Bring milk to the mothers. (Brecht: Collected Plays, Vol. 7 [1971])

With this peculiar, unaccompanied song, Brecht shows a miracle beginning: imaginatively, Grusche’s love transforms the world’s evil into a momentary, idyllic vision, in a brilliantly composed and affecting image—made more powerful by its compression and by its subtle reference to related figures in other Brecht plays. In fact, a fuller understanding of Brecht’s stage will demand that we see it as a fully symbolized sphere, in which any routine element may unexpectedly take on special meaning, such as Mother Courage’s non-progress on the moving turntable floor, or Galileo’s Pope exiting into darkness. Like Ibsen, Brecht moved from a boldly poeticized language in his early plays to an apparent realism that nevertheless functions as a transmogrified poetry, a seemingly conventional dramaturgy internally polarized by ideational schemes and complex revelations of an “inner” meaning. For Ibsen, a spiritual meaning is evoked, whereas for Brecht it is more a vision of concrete social facts, but each is reached through a subtle and complex theatrical poetry that has been too long ignored.

It would be wrong to claim that ignorance or violation of the above principles is the sole cause of our difficulties in staging Brecht. But insofar as these principles permit a clearer and more precise vision of the correspondences between Brecht’s writing and directing, they may provide a basic understanding through which Brecht’s directorial example can be put to better use. I would tell directors who want to undertake Brecht’s plays to use these principles, to look for the significant patternings Brecht has put into the action: patterns of spatial juxtaposition and reversal of symbolic images across time, patterns of symbolic reference, patterns of shifting and complementary tones as the work moves from the explicit to the suggestive realms of Brecht’s complex discourse. Always, I would advise a director to approach the work with playfulness and sensuality, while honoring a Brechtian tightness of focus.

But perhaps most important, I would encourage a director of Brecht to learn to say no—to make distinctions among the various elements of Brecht’s Modellbuch legacies, to discover the difference between the decorative and the fundamental, the temporally bound solutions and the still powerful ones to the challenges of the dramatic texts. I would encourage clearing out everything that has grown customary in Brecht stagings and reaching for a new vision, but a vision strengthened by a firm understanding of the dramaturgic structures and strategies that must shape any vivid retelling of these plays.

Saying no is an aspect of any criticism, and it has operated somewhat tacitly in my own analysis. While sorting out these few essential principles of staging, I have deliberately ignored those principles or elements that I find inessential. Since this list of calculated omissions includes some of Brecht’s most famous and most imitated habits, some of which are still seen as quintessentially Brechtian, I may be on controversial ground here. But every great director, Brecht included, has quirks that somehow prove lively in his hands but only secondhand in others’. Brecht was perhaps unusually liable to develop such idiosyncratic personal codes in his stagings: he had a decidedly eccentric visual taste (which colors every page of his diaries and nearly every other page of Theaterarbeit), and he loved to play with certain historically rooted theatrical devices and with the frisson of then-recent developments, like revolving stages and projections, or, arguably, the scene titles that he seemingly borrowed from silent movies.

Some of the qualities that I relegate to the status of “quirks” (or what a semiotician might call “idiolects”) include: the exposed lighting instruments and scaffolding, the ungelled and unmodulated white light, the half-curtain, the revolving stage, the monochromatic color schemes, the generally utilitarian look, and the affectionately (one could almost say sentimentally) detailed attention to whatever routine labor the characters perform during their onstage action. Undoubtedly, each of these elements can be justified in terms of Brecht’s themes and his desire for an earthy (proletarian) tone; certainly they have proven effective in Brecht’s own hands (and in his theater, his culture, his historical moment).

But by now, all these devices have become the common clichés of mounting a Brecht classic, the calling cards of obedient acolytes, and a sure signal of a kind of sentimental unoriginality; they are almost unvaryingly used instead of deeper and more original insights. If Brecht is a living poet, something not unlike a living prophet, then these superficial stage dressings have become his whited—or dutifully grayed—sepulcher. What is needed is a new practice of staging Brecht that either replaces them or finds a way to render them fresh. For now, I would argue polemically to begin all new Brecht productions by violating one of these less essential stylistic rules. Why not Brecht with colored light, so long as it is used to illumine the play? Why not a masked Grusche and an unmasked, naturalistic Natella Abashwili, in a production that tacitly assumes the normalcy of Natella and the strangeness of Grusche’s selflessness? Why not a circus-clown Setzuan, a Mother Courage and Her Children performed outdoors, or a brassy, brightly colored Mr. Puntila and His Man Matti?

If Brecht is to be re-connected to contemporary theatrical practices and experiment, one element in his staging practice must necessarily be challenged, although that challenge could disorient many of our most fundamental assumptions about Brechtian drama. That is the element of the lifelike itself: mimesis in acting, properties, and set—the limited, abstract mimesis around which Brecht organized his productions. There is a risk involved here, for Brecht’s naturalism is more than a superficial affectation; it is written into his language and is planned as a grounding element in his visual style. Brecht not only chose to include a dash of naturalism; he gave it a privileged position within his array of styles.

Consider the issue of characterization. Brecht’s characters are depicted in a range of abstraction from essentialized political types to detailed individuals whose conflicting social roles produce profound inner disorientation. In staging, Brecht actualized this range of abstraction by using a range of theatrical devices, including facial masks, extreme postures, and caricatured vocal patterns, on the one hand, for the more “essentialized” characters; and unadorned, precisely imitated naturalistic behavior, on the other, for his protagonists. Thus, he grounded his productions in a kind of histrionic naturalism, defining the central characters in lifelike performances so that the peripheral or emblematic (and usually antagonistic) characters displayed their difference through their stylistic distance from verisimilitude. Despite Brecht’s demonstrative discrediting of naturalism as a delimited theatrical idiom, it is still the natural, the lifelike, that grounds his performance style.

But surely such a dependence on verisimilitude is partly determined by theatrical history. It is important to remember that Brecht’s lifelikeness was a breakthrough in its time, a startling move into a recognizable reality in the face of the hysterical rantings of the Nazi theater. Later, the lifelike quality became the saving grace of Brecht’s work under the dicta of socialist realism. But now, in America for one place, the same resemblance to quotidian reality is the common assumption of our least challenging entertainments; Brecht’s subtle experimentation is thus absorbed into our customary ways of seeing. That is why, on American stages, Brecht tends to read as a somewhat mannered realist, and not much more.

But Brecht was not naïve. To an extent, he anticipated this problem. When, in the preface to Roundheads and Peakheads, he made some very early stabs at defining his own staging style, his suspicion and encouragement of non-realistic impulses are revealed at the same time: he was interested in placing a phonograph onstage to accompany the songs in the play, but retreated from the idea for fear that it would “shock the audience unduly or give too much cause for amusement” (Brecht on Theatre, 1964, p. 103). A concern for his audience’s level of theatrical experience and flexibility thus imposed limits on his stylistic excursion. Perhaps the time has come to try the phonograph onstage without fear of disorienting the audience. In the age of rock concerts and performance artists, the audience is less likely to laugh at a little visible musical equipment; in the age of Serban, Sellars, Ciulei, and Foreman, little that Brecht ever dreamed of would seem too unorthodox to try.

What would happen, then, if we were to jettison the lifelike, that one seemingly central element of Brechtian staging? After discarding the monochromatic color and lighting schemes, the revolving stage, and the peculiarities of Eisler’s or Dessau’s music, what might be the result if the naturalistic borrowings were discarded, too? None of the principles I have listed depend upon verisimilitude; in fact, they tend to defy it. What, then, if the defiance were taken further—if Grusche’s internal conflicts were enacted by more than one actress at a time, or if Mother Courage’s moments of “bargaining too long” were somehow reduced to a single, repeated gestural motif in a production that eschewed lifelike movement for choreographic extremity? What if Brecht’s plays were theatrically reconceived as boldly as Shakespeare’s, Chekhov’s, Ibsen’s, Calderon’s, or Wagner’s have been over the past few decades?

There is no guarantee of any sort of success in all this; I raise these questions fully aware of that. After all, Brecht wrote the naturalistic element into the plays painstakingly, and the loving care with which he did so is one of the signal traits of his achievement. But where there might be losses, there also might be significant gains: Brecht himself recognized and feared the danger of even seeming to belong to or resemble the realistic commercial theater. (That is why, in his final period, he put such stress on the “poetic” qualities of his work, as he did in his notes to The Tutor: for he feared that these qualities would be ignored, that his work would not stand out against the stultifying customs—and overwhelming presence—of conventional theater.) To divest these plays of their lifelike pretensions might forcibly awaken us to Brecht as a theatrical poet with a passionate and visionary consciousness, and unseat the somewhat mannered, socialist Zola that he has tended to become on American stages.

In the United States, there have already been some hints of this kind of liberating experiment. Having seen none of them, I can only surmise about how well they illuminated the plays (or, for that matter, whether they embodied any of the “first principles” I noted above). But they have been described vividly enough for one to sense in them the validity of passionate experiment. Productions like the Living Theater’s Antigone, the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s Turandot, and Travis Preston’s Good Person of Setzuan seem to have been thoughtful, poetic re-creations of Brecht’s works. The presence of such stagings grants these plays their thinkability, their richness, their open appeal to the imagination; these stagings seek, in their irreverent way, to restore to Brecht his status as a poet of the theater, again a living and surprising—rather than tiresomely familiar and predictable—presence on our stage.